Weblog on German-English legal translation, no longer from Fürth

Main menu

Post navigation

This is not a review, and I think dictionary reviews are difficult anyway. But I’d like to say that I’ve had a look at the second edition of Karin Linhart’s law dictionary (DE>EN, EN>DE, 2017) and it really does look greatly changed and improved from the first edition (2010).

One feature of this dictionary remains that its strongest point is the EN>DE part, with a preference (I still feel) for AmE. There are boxouts (those little additional glossary boxes), which Beck Verlag seems to love – I’m not sure who reads them – mainly in that section, but in the DE>EN section too. Their number has decreased. There are definitely English as well as US terms.

The foreword states that the dictionary has been newly designed, expanded and updated, and it is oriented mainly towards foreign students at German, Austrian and Swiss universities, but it is also for German students studying abroad, for lawyers, judges, and although it is written more from a lawyer’s point of view than a translator’s (what on earth does this mean?) it may be of use for translators and interpreters too.

A lot of the end materials have gone. including the amusing advice for German lawyers speaking English abroad and the US and South African constitutions. There is now only a specimen letter of application and CV for Germans applying in the USA.

The new edition is said to have Austrian and Swiss terms in it. So I checked the term Herabsetzungsklage – Herabsetzungsurteil came up as a query on a mailing list this week. And it is in there:

This is excellent. The term is also in Tom West’s Trilingual Swiss Dictionary, of course, there citing Art. 522, which is equally appropriate, but without the definition.

One thing that strikes me on my cursory review is that there is an emphasis on terminology, especially nouns, from statutes, rather than, for example, conjunctions and turns of phrase – this is not surprising in a small dictionary, and it is what I would go to Romain for. But my Romain is falling apart and there is no help on the horizon – this might be what is meant by saying it is a dictionary conceived for lawyers rather than translators.

There are a large number of cross-references, necessary to save space in a small dictionary.

Noted in flicking through:lucidum intervallum is translated as clear moment, rather than the usual lucid interval.

Lockvogel Strafr. agent provocateur (stool pigeon? decoy? not a very common word)

Arglistige Täuschung is followed by = List (A), that is, the Austrian equivalent is introduced after the German term – very useful. Other examples are Sorgerecht, (A) Obsorge

The English claimant for Kläger is there, but other new terms like statement of case are not.

mens rea is cross-referenced to criminal state of mind, which is the main headword and a very oddly phrased one, but I suppose it is hard to give a brief definition.

Anyway, this is just a brief reference. I will probably come back to the dictionary. I wish I had made a list of words to check all legal dictionaries for.

I must say I believed the story that barristers’ gowns had a pocket on them because they were not allowed to sue for fees and some money could discreetly be put in there by the client. However, it appears that that story was an invention and the pocket (known as a liripipe) is the remnant of a mourning hood assumed on the death of King Charles II in 1685.

As I have frequently posted – e.g. here -, the image of a gavel is often used in British and German newspapers to illustrate a court judgment. But UK and German judges don’t use gavels. Judges in the USA use them. In the UK, the gavel or hammer is what an auctioneer uses.

I don’t suppose everyone would understand how irritating it is to keep seeing this totally inappropriate image. But one site that does is Inappropriate Gavels. They tweet at @igavels too, and there’s no lack of examples in the press.

It strikes me that the gavel is a good image to use – stock image companies are full of them. alamy reports 28.294 images of gavels. So we need an alternative image.

The only commonly used image for a court decision apart from gavels is the scales of justice, sometimes held by a woman. alamy seems to have 6,937 of those. Maybe we should be encouraging good images of the scales of justice if we are to eradicate the gavel.

I have been clearing out a lot of papers – hence the putting online again of the Geoffrey Perrin articles and one by me – and I came across the October 1995 issue of Translation News, a journal that posted news about the industry from 1989 to 1995 – the October 1995 issue was the last-but-one. That news often concerned the US scene. I encountered Bernie on Compuserve’s FLEFO in the early 1990s. It was an exciting time.

Translation News (TN) was a newsletter published regularly by Bernard Bierman between November 1989 and December 1995. At its peak it had a little over a thousand subscribers and was undoubtedly read by many more. TN specialized in reporting and opinion pieces about issues of concern to translators and interpreters on a national level. It offered an informed glimpse into the inner workings of the major translator trade organizations and was a must for anyone wanting to keep up-to-date with the field. Unlike the various house organs, it never shied away from controversial issues. Taken as a whole, Translation News is a unique and important historical document of translation in the United States just before the Internet began to come into widespread use.

Because of this historical significance, the New England Translators Association (NETA) is pleased to make available the entire run of Translation News in searchable PDF form. We are indebted to Bernie Bierman and Rosene Zaros (the custodian of Mr. Bierman’s translation-related papers) for supplying all of the editions, and to Brand Frentz for contributing six very scarce early editions in mint condition (Vol. I Nos. 2-7, 1989-1990).

Many years ago, when I was teaching legal translation in Erlangen, I found some articles by Geoffrey Perrin which were very useful to me. Geoffrey let me put them on my website, but for some years after a move of the site they were not available. Now I had added a page with three of them, and also an old article by myself on translating German court names into English.

Geoffrey Perrin was at one time in the language department of the German Federal Ministry of Justice, then in Bonn, and later at the Bundessprachenamt at Hürth. The articles are on the many words for ‘copy’ in German, which unlike English prefers specific terms like Abdruck, Ablichtung, Abschrift and at least ten others; on how to translate ‘Rechtsverordnung’ (not necessarily as ordinance), and on the terminology of the juvenile criminal law – although the German terminology may change over the years, the article is still useful.

The link to the page Articles can be found in the column on the right.

Last Friday, June 30, the German Bundestag voted in favour of same-sex marriage, called ‘marriage for all’ (following François Hollande). The bill will no doubt be passed by the Bundesrat and signed by the President and become law in the autumn. But will there be a constitutional challenge?

June 30 was the last day of Angela Merkel’s current parliament and as there is to be a general election, the marriage-for-all bill, which had been introduced at least three years earlier, would otherwise have failed. I haven’t been following this closely and it’s a big issue, so please do further reading for details and don’t rely on me. But I believe that the Green Party applied unsuccessfully to the Federal Constitutional Court to make sure that the bill could be voted on on June 30 at the latest. (I can see the sense of the Court not intervening in the parliamentary process).

The CDU and CSU are traditionally against same-sex marriage, but on June 27 Angela Merkel permitted a free vote in the Bundestag, so suddenly it became possible for the bill to be passed, as not only some CDU and CSU members were in favour of it, but the SPD would also have been bound as part of the coalition government . The suddenness almost recalls the sudden opening of the Berlin wall in 1989.

Ms. Merkel, when asked Monday evening about gay adoption, cited what she said was a recent meeting with a lesbian who invited the chancellor to visit her and her partner’s home in Ms. Merkel’s parliamentary constituency in northern Germany, where the couple has raised at least eight foster children.
The chancellor said she had not had time to take up the invitation, but she used it as a way to illustrate that it may often be better for children to live permanently with a loving couple no matter what their sex, rather than moving from home to home in foster care.

Although Frau Merkel voted against the bill – she could be seen putting a red ticket into the ballot box – it’s been suggested that in acting this late before the election she was both avoiding a long discussion in the Bundestag and improving her chances in the election, since marriage for all was one of the issues on which Martin Schulz was going to campaign.

German legal bloggers disagree on what will happen next. Here is Maximilian Steinbeis at Verfassungsblog (lots of English there)Merkel’s Conscience:

In some way, the right always seems to succeed in making themselves believe that their reading of the constitution is somehow dictated by nature. They did that with the opening of the borders in 2015, and now they do the same with the opening of marriage in 2017. There will always be some constitutional law professor who certifies their constitutional interpretation with utmost authority, so they can keep on shaking their heads in a distressed and indignant way at the turpitude of these liberals that so blatantly disobey their own liberal constitution.

To not let them get away with that, to pierce their self-congratulatory constitutional certainty and force them to justify their readings of the law – this should be the task of constitutionalists.

I’m just posting this old entry to check my blog is still working. I had thousands of attacks on my site in the last couple of days (as in April) and had to ask the provider to help restore things, but it looks OK now.

Some observations from my 2016 visit to Germany.

Selection of magazines, I think this was in Nuremberg train station:

Here’s a particular curiosity:

This magazine is not, as you might think, soft porn, it’s a magazine for men who like to cook meat. But perhaps that’s the same thing.

Beck Verlag has a number of introductions to foreign legal systems, and it has now added one to Luxembourg law, by João Nuno Pereira und Dr. Jochen Zenthöfer. There’s an interview with the authors (in German) here: “Ein vorbildlicher Rechtsstaat”.

Luxembourg has three official languages: German, French and Luxembourgish. This is the first account of Luxembourg law in German and it will be useful for those of the Luxembourgers (of whom there are somewhat over 570,000) who prefer to read German.

Thanks to Christine Schmit on Twitter (her website can also be read in Luxembourgish).